1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the delivery of content to online users and, more particularly, to a method and system for selective content delivery.
2. Description of Related Art
A vast amount of information is available online, especially over the Internet. Users commonly search for desired information using online search engines. Search engines typically search documents on the Internet for specified keywords and generate a list of the documents having the keywords. The documents are commonly sorted based, e.g., on how well they correlate to the user's query or in some other way such as in alphabetical order. Queries can also be made by clicking on a particular item or category in a list of such items or categories. The sorted results are then returned to the user typically all at once. The user then determines what documents to access by scrolling through the search results.
Scrolling is needed in order to review all of the results, especially in handheld Internet devices, which have small screens with limited display capacities. Scrolling is a tedious and time consuming process as users are typically inundated with large numbers of results. Sorting based on correlating results to user queries is often inaccurate. Accordingly, items at the top of the list of results are often unwarrantedly favored as users typically do not scroll very far down on the results.
A need exists for a method and system for selecting and displaying only a subset of all possible search results at a time with the subset selected based on satisfying some predetermined display requirements associated with the results.